Cultivation and Culture: Labor and the Shaping of Slave Life in the Americas (Carter G. Woodson Institute Series: Black Studies at Work in the World)

Berlin, Ira [Editor]; Morgan, Philip D. [Editor];

ISBN 10: 0813914248 / ISBN 13: 9780813914244

Published by University of Virginia Press, 1993

About this Item

[Personal copy of renowned historian, Philip D. Morgan (Editor).] Softcover. Good binding and cover. Shelf wear. Crease to cover. Foxing to top edge. From the professional library of Dr. Philip D. Morgan, a professor of History at Johns Hopkins University. Morgan specializes in the African-American experience, the history of slavery, the early Caribbean, and the study of the early Atlantic world. Morgan is the author of more than 14 books on Colonial America and African American history. He has won both the Bancroft Prize and the Frederick Douglass Prize for his book Slave Counterpoint: Black Culture in the Eighteenth-Century Chesapeake and Lowcountry (1998).

Seller Inventory # 2504220108

Bibliographic Details

• Title: Cultivation and Culture: Labor and the Shaping of Slave Life in the Americas (Carter G. Woodson Institute Series: Black Studies at Work in the World)
• Publisher: University of Virginia Press
• Publication Date: 1993
• Language: English
• ISBN 10: 0813914248
• ISBN 13: 9780813914244
• Binding: Paperback
• Condition: Good
• Weight: 23 ounces
• Seller catalogs:
  • African American History

About this title

Synopsis

So central was labor in the lives of African-American slaves that it has often been taken for granted, with little attention given to the type of work that slaves did and the circumstances surrounding it. Cultivation and Culture brings together leading scholars of slavery - historians, anthropologists, and sociologists - to explore when, where, and how slaves labored in growing the New World's great staples and how this work shaped the institution of slavery and the lives of African-American slaves.

Selected from a conference on comparative slavery at the University of Maryland that set the agenda for the next decades' research in this field, the essays focus on the inter-relationship between the demands of particular crops, the organisation of labour, the nature of the labour force and the character of agricultural technology. They reveal the full complexity of the institution of chattel bondage in the New World and suggest why and how slavery varied from place to place and time to time.

What these scholars show is that although work in the slave owners' fields accounted for most of the slaves' labouring time, slaves also worked for themselves and their independent economic activities had far reaching consequences. By producing food for themselves and others, tending cash crops, raising livestock, manufacturing finished goods, marketing their own products, consuming and saving the proceeds, and bequething property to their descendents, slaves took control of a large part of their lives. In many ways their independent economic endeavours offered a foundation for their domestic and commuity life, determining the social structure of slave society and providing a material basis for their distinctive culture. In exploring both the work that slaves performed for their owners and the work they did for themselves, Cultivation and Culture sheds new light on the origins and development of African-American culture and provides a new understanding of the African-American experience in slavery.

About the Author

Ira Berlin is Professor of History at the University of Maryland. His publications include, with Philip D. Morgan The Slaves' Economy: Independent Production by Slaves in the New World and as, chief editor, Freedom: A Documentary History of Emancipation. Philip D. Morgan is Associate Professor of History at Florida State University. His publications include Slave Counterpoint: Black Culture in the Eighteenth-Century Chesapeake and Lowcountry and, with Bernard Bailyn, Strangers within the Realm: Cultural Margins of the First British Empire.